Diamond Radeon HD5770 XOC Review

Introduction:

The HD 5770 graphics cards is one of those rare products that offers the end user an almost perfect price to performance ratio. For somewhere around $160, you can get a card that will produce good frames per second in most games on the market and also includes new features such as DX11 support, Eyefinity and ATI Stream technology. So, how to do you take a product that offers as much as the HD 5770 does and make it even better? You crank up the performance. This is exactly what Diamond did with its latest offering based on the HD 5770 chip. This card, which is appropriately named the XOC (eXtreme OverClocked) version, comes with the core clocked in at 930MHz and the memory at 1300MHz, which is an 80MHz increase on the core and 100MHz increase on the memory, over the reference design. With these faster clocks, this card will achieve higher frames per second than the lower clocked versions and do so right out of the box, without additional tweaking. Just how much performance the additional clock speeds will yield though, is what I intend to find out as we delve into our in depth look at the Diamond HD5770 XOC.

Closer Look:

The graphic card comes packaged in a rectangular shaped box that devotes the entire front cover to Colin McRae's Dirt 2. This game goes well with the HD5770 line because it is one of the few DX11 games currently available. Other than the image of the game, you will find some additional information of the front, such a sticker identifying this card as the XOC version, the size of memory, and the PCI bus type. Turning the packaging over, you can see that the back panel is where you find the more detailed information about the graphics card. On this panel, you will find information explaining how the card utilizes the latest technologies, such as DX11, ATI Stream and Eyefininty. The box also lists the system requirements and features for the card, with these being found on the sides of the packaging.

The packaging we were looking at before is actually just the outer portion of the box that is used to advertise and give information about the product. To remove this outer covering, you simply open the side panel and pull on it until the inner packaging slides out. The inner packaging is just a plain white cardboard box that houses the graphics card and accessories. When opened, you are first presented with the included accessories sitting on top of a foam pad. Below this is the graphic card, which comes wrapped in a red anti-static bag, which will protect it from any electro-static damage prior to the card being removed from its protective casing. The accessories include a CrossFire bridge, VGA to DVI adapter, installation disk, and the manual.